"You may want to watch how our failing infrastructure will impact our cities," Jonathan Miller warned the gathered real estate editors. Miller, the author of Emerging Trends, is a partner in the New York City-based consultancy of Miller Ryan LLC. By 2010, he predicted, "We will have a $1.6-trillion deficit in infrastructure development."

Our system of roads alone, Miller pointed out, is now 30 to 40 years old and built with federal dollars. Those dollars are gone, he said, and "the burden of building new roads and maintaining older ones has shifted to local and state governments."

Miller also used the venue to introduce "Infrastructure 2007, his collaboration with the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young. (ULI, with PricewaterhouseCoopers, makes up the rest of the team that produces Emerging Trends). In the study, one interviewee was quoted as saying, "It's discouraging to see dollars pushed around Wall Street, handing out highways assets to private companies, without looking at how these roads integrate with mass transit and future needs, redesigning development around interchanges and building more high-rise, pedestrian-friendly communities." The speaker is a planning consultant, the report says.

At the Naree session, Miller concluded by pointing out that the issue of a failing infrastructure "speaks to the competitiveness of our cities."

Read more on Naree's conference, and the need for transit-oriented developments.